From the NAV Blogs: When to Purchase the License; Updated Test Drive Site; Using Temporary Tables; The Promise of Unicode

When Should You Purchase the NAV License? Vjekoslav Babic provides a thoughtful answer:

Microsoft Partners often postpone the actual purchase of the customer's NAV license until the project is fairly close to go-live. In the meanwhile, they do the development and the testing on-site (or off-site) using their own partner license. I've heard arguments (or better: excuses) to engage in this practice, and I have a very strong opinion on this. So, when is the right moment to actually purchase the NAV license for your customer?

Well, regardless of the fact that 1) you are contractually obliged to purchase the license for your customer at the first moment they get in touch with the solution (which is fairly early in the project), and the fact that 2) you are violating your licensing agreement with Microsoft if you deploy your partner license on third party's infrastructure, there is 3) a fairly compelling technical reason why you might never want to even try doing any project work involving customer with your partner license...

Updated Dynamics NAV Test Drive site: From the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog: "Check out the updated Microsoft Dynamics NAV Test Drive site, where potential customers can log onto our Test Drive environment using their web browser and experience Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 first hand without the need of installing it themselves. On the site, you'll also find case studies, demos, videos, white papers, and other resources ...